gera wrote:you seem to be confusing 737 and 787: these are two completely different planes

No confusion. The point I made was clear. Both planes were put into the air and then both had to be grounded. The 787 suffered several initially unexplained on-board fires. The 737 Max has had two total hull loss crashes with several hundred of deaths. Neither should have occurred in the 21st century in new aircraft.

It would not have been difficult to find the 787 battery fault had there been sufficient testing. Present indications are that new systems introduced to the 787 Max are probably also faulty. What was Boeing doing when it issued pilot manuals that were, in the words of a qualified 737 captain, "“inadequate and almost criminally insufficient.” So that 737 Max aircraft was put into service in a state perfectly safe to fly? I doubt it.

Let me add that i agree Boeing has made some great planes. I loved the various models of the 747. Leaving aside highjacking, it's first accident occurred on a Lufthansa flight 6 years after being introduced into service. The first 757 accident occurred 7 years after entry. The 767 was 9 years after entry. The first 777 accident 13 years after entry. Is it therefore not more than strange that several 787s (a plane I still do not enjoy flying) self-combusted in its very first year of service? And is it not more than strange that two new 737 Max aircraft have crashed in similar circumstances soon after take-off with total loss of life less than two years after its entry? Something is clearly going wrong within Boeing.

Boeing makes great airplanes. That does not mean that like any company something may only show itself after the product has been in use for some time.

The cover up is always worse than the mistake and it appears Boeing is in full cover up mode. And unlike previous problems , the US government is run by a mental midget who has placed more mental midgets in jobs that require knowledge and the ability to make close calls. That plane would have been grounded much faster in any other Administration. But the Trump Administration puts people in key posts who should be flipping hamburgers.

They don't know what they are doing and because of it an agency such as the NTSB is being unfairly restricted from doing what they have done for years.

The bottom line, Boeing knew they had a software problem and they neither corrected it in a much more timely manner or put out a safety bulletin warning Pilots to be aware . But the easiest thing would be to actually have the pilot hand fly the
aircraft until say 10,000 feet or more until the potential problems have been fixed.

I know hindsight is always 20-20 but really the professionals have failed at many levels and certainly the blood of those killed are on their hands.

Lot more information starting to come out. As always it is about money. Boeing made changes to the placement of the engines and major upgrades to the Avionics ( Computers) that rune the plane's systems.

However they were especially cognizant of not having it to be recognized as a new plane . The reason is that if it was a new plane pilots would have to be trained and this would be costly to Boeing and the airlines .
The new computer systems changed in that when the computer takes control it is because of something going wrong. In the past systems there are checks and balance between the sensors and decisions were made taking all systems into account. The new computer system apparently allowed the computer to take over control if it sensed an imminent stall of the aircraft on any of its sensors.. In simple terms a stall in an aircraft is https://www.quora.com/What-causes-stall-in-an-Aircraft

So if an imminent stall is about to happen the computer would react by pushing the nose of the plane down. Of course this more dangerous the closer to the ground you are. Now Boeing was aware of the problem and had outlined it in the manual what to do in order to take back control. Apparently there were 2 switches that had to be engaged and the airplane would be immediately returned to the control of the flight crew.

Apparently it was not very clear in the manual and since crews did not have to be trained on the aircraft because it was not new , there were certainly pilots who did not understand the systems.

Now idiots like Trump will try to make this about flying becoming too technical with too many computers etc. Just ridiculous on the face . Commercial Aviation has done nothing but get safer and safer over the years and certainly computers are one of the main reasons.

But money can always ruin a good thing and the decision not to train the pilots on a new aircraft or at least require pilots sign off and demonstrate their knowledge of overriding the computers with this new system is a disgrace and both Boeing and the FAA deserve the highest of criticisms.

As far as I can see, both generally make very good planes and I would rather fly them than some of the old Russian planes for example. There are new Russian and Chinese planes in the pipeline and I intend to stay clear of these until they have completed 5 years service.

firecat69 wrote:idiots like Trump will try to make this about flying becoming to technical with too many computers etc. Just ridiculous on the face . Commercial Aviation has done nothing but get safer and safer over the years and certainly computers are one of the main reasons.

Interesting comment regarding finding and rectifying the software problems apparent in the Lion Air Crash and the automatic nose-down complaints from several pilots. The Wall Street Journal has already reported that Boeing started working on a fix soon after that crash.

A software fix for the 737 Max that Boeing has been working on since the Lion Air crash will take months to complete, the FAA said on Wednesday. The implementation of that fix was delayed for five weeks because of the US’s government shutdown, the Wall Street Journal revealed this week.

I'm not sure how the shutdown would have affected Boeing, but if the report is fact, then Trump has blood on his hands. Makes a change from shit, I suppose!

But another question needs to be asked of Boeing. Clearly it was aware that this was a major problem - just as the lithium batteries had become a major issue when it introduced the 787. Lion Air crashed in October. Since then 71 days have passed excluding the 35 days of the government shutdown. We are now being told the software fix will not be ready until the end of April. What has Boeing been doing over those 71 days? Did they approach the issue with any degree of urgency? Or did they assume that the changes to the pilots' manual and the request that captains have an extra days' training would be sufficient in the short to medium term? Were their software technicians and engineers working day and night or was the approach more casual? That question requires an answer since, to my mind, it determines if Boeing, aware its plane had a serious problem and that tens of thousands of people were flying in it daily, actually attacked the problem as a vital priority.

Interesting comment on the BBC a few moments ago. We have been told that a pilot could de-activate the aircraft's automatic nose-down action just by turning off two switches. What I had not known is that once it has been deactivated, the software automatically clicks back in and pitches the nose down again. This see-saw downward pitch happened no less than 23 times before the Indonesian 737 Max8 crashed.

Now the black boxes are revealing "clear similarities" between the Ethiopian and Lion Air crashes.

Also the FAA in the USA has ordered an investigation into the Approval Process for the aircraft. This was conducted by Boeing itself. One expert suggested this implies that Boeing improperly carried out the certification process and may indeed have put an inherently unsafe aircraft into the air.

Another scary piece of news from The New York Times. In the USA prior to the grounding of the 737 Max aircraft there were 74 of the aircraft flying. Yet in the entire country there is only one simulator for pilot training. American Airlines has been told it will not receive its first simulator until the end of 2019. United Airlines has to wait until 2020!

And what else did Boeing do to ensure pilots knew about the aircraft's new systems?

When United was set to take delivery of the 737 Max in 2017, a group of pilots put together training materials without ever flying the aircraft or a full simulator. James LaRosa, a 737 captain and union official who helped lead the training group, said he flew to a Boeing training center in Seattle to learn about the new plane on a mock cockpit that didn’t move like typical simulators.

In addition to a two-hour iPad training course from Boeing, he and colleagues used their experience in the cockpit to create a 13-page handbook on the differences between the Max and its predecessor, including changes to displays and the engines. The training materials did not mention the new software that later became a focus of the Lion Air crash investigation.

Federal Aviation Administration managers pushed its engineers to delegate wide responsibility for assessing the safety of the 737 MAX to Boeing itself. But safety engineers familiar with the documents shared details that show the analysis included crucial flaws.

As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis.

But the original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA for a new flight control system on the MAX — a report used to certify the plane as safe to fly — had several crucial flaws.

. . . Current and former engineers directly involved with the evaluations or familiar with the document shared details of Boeing’s “System Safety Analysis” of MCAS, which The Seattle Times confirmed.

The safety analysis:

Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.

Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.

Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed.

Worse, the details in the Seattle Times article were submitted to Boeing and the FAA and asked for a response - 11 days before the Ethiopian crash. t's a long article but ends by pointing the finger at both Boeing and the FAA who will be hit with multiple lawsuits resulting from their failures.

According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing will change the MCAS software to give the system input from both angle-of-attack sensors.

It will also limit how much MCAS can move the horizontal tail in response to an erroneous signal. And when activated, the system will kick in only for one cycle, rather than multiple times.

Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS.

These proposed changes mirror the critique made by the safety engineers in this story. They had spoken to The Seattle Times before the Ethiopian crash.

The FAA said it will mandate Boeing’s software fix in an airworthiness directive no later than April.

Facing legal actions brought by the families of those killed, Boeing will have to explain why those fixes were not part of the original system design. And the FAA will have to defend its certification of the system as safe.